He walked toward her, closing the distance she wanted to keep. “Uram’s movements can’t be predicted. Not yet. We must wait.”

“For what?”

“Blood.”

The single word chilled her from the inside out. “What did he do?”

Raphael lifted a finger, tracing it over her cheekbone. She flinched. Not because he was hurting her. The opposite. The places he touched . . . it was as if he had a direct line to the hottest, most feminine part of her. A single stroke and she was embarrassingly damp. But she refused to pull away, refused to give in.

“What,” she repeated, “did he do?”

That finger passed over her jaw and whispered along the line of her neck, giving excruciating, unwanted pleasure. “Nothing you need to know. Nothing that will help you track him.”

Raising her hand with effort, she pushed his off, knowing her success was very much a case of him indulging her. And that chafed. “Finished playing your sex games?” she asked point-blank.

His smile was less a shadow this time, those changeable eyes sliding from black to something closer to cobalt. Alive. Electric. “I wasn’t doing anything to your mind, Elena. Not that time.”

Oh, shit.

He’d lied. Obviously, he’d lied. Elena let out a sigh of relief and collapsed onto her sofa. She wasn’t idiotic enough to be attracted to an archangel. That left door number two—that Raphael had been playing with her mind and telling her otherwise was simply some sort of a twisted way for him to mess with her.

The annoying little voice inside her head kept whispering that that kind of manipulation didn’t mesh with what she knew of Raphael. On the roof, he’d made no secret of the fact that he’d been in her mind. Lying seemed beneath him. “Hah!” she said to the voice. “What I know about him isn’t enough to fill a thimble—he’s manipulated mortals for centuries. He’s good at it.” Not good. Expert.